How to make your own dabs at home the safe way

Dabs have quickly emerged in the marijuana community as one of the most popular, effective and unique ways to get high. Dabs, also known as “shatter,” are a type of highly concentrated extract that resembles amber and are commonly vaporized using a method that involves a handheld torch and “dab rig” (basically a small, slightly modified bong).

But for those who still live in a state where marijuana is illegal, shatter can be difficult to find. Traditionally, marijuana enthusiasts have made dabs at home by combining marijuana with butane—a solvent which extracts pure THC from marijuana—and then evaporating the butane so that THC is all that remains.

But butane is highly flammable, making it dangerous. This technique can also be slightly tricky to pull off. That’s why a new, safer and easier method of making homemade shatter has become increasingly popular among dab enthusiasts.

How to make dabs at home with only a hair straightener and parchment paper.

1) Take about one gram of marijuana and put it onto a piece of parchment paper.

2) Fold the parchment paper in half over the weed so that your bud is sandwiched into the paper.

3) Turn the hair straightener on medium-low heat and let it heat up for 20 seconds.

4) Put the weed (still inside the parchment paper) in between the hair straightener’s hot prongs and squeeze it as hard as you can for five seconds. To accomplish this most effectively, squeeze down on the very tips of the prongs instead of squeezing them from the bottom of the hair straightener (as you normally would when straightening hair). Use cooking gloves if you can so you don’t burn yourself!

5) Then, open the parchment paper, take the flattened weed out and set it aside.

If you did it properly, you should notice a sticky, honey-colored material on the parchment paper. Usually, it will be stuck to the paper in a ring-shaped pattern around where the bud once was. This is your shatter (or dab).

To get the most shatter or dabs out of your gram of weed, you can try doing this a few times with the same bud.

That’s all, folks!

If this technique sounds ridiculously easy, it’s because it is. Just scrape the shatter off the parchment paper, and you’re ready to smoke. You can even use the same technique to extract shatter from hash or kief.

While shatter is best enjoyed with a dab rig, you can also add your shatter to the top of a bowl or roll it into a joint. This is, after all, how many marijuana enthusiasts smoked shatter before the popularization of the dab rig.

So there you have it: homemade dabs made safe, fast and easy. Happy dabbing!